631 The 2017 American Solar Eclipse

- Hey there, gang, this is Deke McClelland.Welcome to Deke's Techniques.This week I'm interrupting everythingbecause of one of the most amazingexperiences of my life anyway.Just a week ago yesterday, specifically,on Monday, August 21st of theyear 2017 I was able to witnessand capture the great American solar eclipse.Now I live in Boulder, Colorado.We did not experience the totality down here,but two of our northern neighbors did,both Wyoming and Nebraska.And we decided to select Nebraska specifically,Alliance, Nebraska, home to Carhenge,and I had in mind that I would end upcapturing something along the lines of this right here.

Now, in fact, I did capture every one of these photographs,but this is, of course, a bit of fakery inside of Photoshop.Imagine that.A fake image of the solar eclipse.I've never seen such a thing.At any rate, we did ultimately decideto go to Alliance, Nebraska,but we did not settle on Carhenge for a couple of reasons.First of all, Carhenge is, you know,pretty cool for a goofy place on the side of the road,but it was very crowded.This is the day before.The day of was absolute mayhem.

I'm not even sure if I could have gotten a tripod in there.Secondly, the sun wasn't at an altitude of 30 degreesso that we could capture itwith Carhenge in the foreground.In fact, the actual totality in Alliance, at any rate,happened at about 11:50 a.m. so nearly high noon.So the sun was way way up there in the sky.So we settled on a place slightly outside of Alliancespecifically this bunkhouse right here that we AirBNBed.Delightful little place owned by these guys.Stephanie and Tom.

The amazing thing about Tom not only doeshe run an actual fully functioningranch with 200 head of cattle,but he's also a small and large animal veterinarianwho specializes in surgery.And so when we met him he was justtaking his first day off in six monthsso it was a lot of fun I'm here to tell you.And he alsogave us free range to his 1,000 acre ranchso instead of settling in Carhenge,we selected this spot right here.This enchanted glen, or glade or whatever it iswith this windmill that's pumping outfresh water from an aquifer.

Yummiest water you ever did drink,and that kept us hydrated during the twoand a half hours of the eclipse.Now the actual totality of the eclipseonly lasted two and a half minutes.During which I was able to capture 18 photographs,and these are my three favorites.We've got this guy right here.These are totally for real by the way.No Photoshoppery besides development going on.And so this is the moon,or that is to say the sunas it was just going behind the moon.

The silhouette of the black moon here in its totalityso we have just a little bit of a spark still showing up,and then here's the sun leaving the moon,and so we have this kind of diamond ring effect,but my favorite shot of all was duringthe height of totality at 11:51,and 57 seconds a.m.this shot right here.Just absolutely blows me away.Even though I did capture it,but still, I didn't know it was going to be this awesome.And we've got this amazing coronaand if you look carefully we have asolar flare at about 1:30 on the dial,and about 3:30 as well.

And so we can see all kinds of detailsin the sun thanks to the fact thatthe main body of the sun is covered up by the moon.Now, question becomes Deek you have told usmany, many, many, many times thatyou are not a photographer, and it gets even better.I have never even triedto capture the moon beforelet alone some other celestial bodyso how in the world did I get this shot?It's only slightly ever so slightlycropped as you're about to see.

Well, what I had to do was some research,and I had to make a few purchases as wellso I ended up grabbing this guy.It's a 400 millimeter fixed lens by the way.It's not a zoom lens, and so, as a resultit's cheaper for one thing, and also it's lighterbecause it doesn't have any moving parts.Now this guy right here this is a sticky hairbandthat we used to hold on the filter,and I'll tell you more about that in a moment.Now this is not enough magnificationwhich is why I had to add this 2x extenderwhich gives us the equivalent of 800 millimetersthat is to say 16x magnification.

Now, of course, we need a tripod to hold this big boy,and so I settled on this guy right here.It is aSirui, Sirui,Sirui is how you pronounce it,and it came highly recommended.It's a great tripod.It has degrees in order to track the sun going back,and forth but where the altitude of the sunup and down was concerned I was largely on my own,and that was the toughest partfor me was just finding the sun.So you look at it up in the sky,and you go hey there's the sun.Problem is, when you think about itit's really actually very dinky in the sky,and yet it's taking up this entire frame right here.

And so what I do to compose the shotbecause, you know, you're trying to lookthrough the viewfinder or something,and I tried that at firstwith and without the glasses, and it's like agh!You know, you could go blind veryquickly that way I would imagine.So what I do instead was I would composite the shotwith just the 400 millimeter lens and the camera on it.Made it way easier to find.And I spent about a good minutemaybe two minutes doing that tryingto get it exactly centered,and very unforgiving as you might imagine.Any tiny movement's going to make a big difference,and then, once I did that I would very carefullytake the camera off, very carefully put the 2x extender on,and then very carefully put the camera back onso as not to mess up my shot.

Which brings us, of course, to the camera itself,and it's this guy right here.It's my Canon 70D.It's not necessarily my most powerful camera,but it is the camera with which I'm most familiar.This is the one I take scuba diving.I love it so.But the big thing in its favor was this flip LCDthat I could use to compose the shot.So instead of looking through the viewfinder,I know guys that could probably do that,but at 60 degrees I could not.I could not make it work so I used the LCD instead,and, as a result, let's see ifI can get a preview up on screen here.

I was able to compose the shot better than that.So this is one composition not so good.This is another much better,and this is pretty much the shot that we were seeingmagnified on paper just a moment ago.That is to say printed very large.Alright there's one more thing that I want to say here,and that's a note about the filterso you may recall, those of you whowere watching the solar eclipse,that you had to wear special glassesso as not to burn out your retina.And you had to do that with a camera as well.

You have to put a filter on for most of the eclipse,and so, when you're looking at something like thislet's say it's an authentic composition.There are many authentic ones out there,and they look like this, that is to say,where we have a bunch of crescent sunsthat are yellowish or orangish,and then all of a sudden we have this white totality.And it may not have a lens flare like mine does,but it would be white and then as the crescentsleave again they turn orange or yellowand that's because the crescents are filtered.

So anytime that you're seeing a bunch of sunyou have to filter the lens,but as soon as its covered up in its entirety by the moonyou can take the filter off.And that's how I was able to achieve all those imagesincluding this one right here.Alright, what I'd like to do nowis show you how I developed this shotas well as how I ever so slightly cropped itusing a combination of Photoshop and camera RAW.Alright, now I imagine a few of youare wondering what camera settings I used.

Obviously, I was shooting manual.I wouldn't get these shots any other way.Now, for this lens I believe theaperture opens as wide as f/11.I went ahead and stopped it down to f/20,and I set the shutter speed to 1/30th of a secondso I could get some very clear shots,and I raised the ISO to 400which means I did end up with a littlebit of noise as we're about to see.Alright, I'm going to select that text layer and get rid of it,and then I'll take this flat background,and I'll double-click on it here inside the Layers panel,and I'll go ahead and call this new layerTotal Eclipse, and I'll click Okay.

And then, armed with my rectangular marquee tool,near the top of the toolbox,I'll go ahead and right-click inside the image window,and choose Convert to Smart Object.Then I'll go up to the Filter menu,and choose Camera Raw Filter.Now I am working inside camera RAW here inside Photoshop,but you could apply these exactsame settings in Lightroom if you prefer.Now, notice if I zoom on in that the coronaaround the sun, which of course, is blockedby the moon is pretty darn bright.

And so, I wanted to take the exposure down a little bit,and I did that by pressing the Alt key,or the Option key on a Mac,and notice that that allows me to preview the effectas I apply it and so notice thatI have a solar flare right here at this locationat about 1:30 I would say,and then down here at 3:30, if you will,I have another solar flare.And so, if I press and hold the Alt key,the Option key on a Mac,and I click and hold on this slider trianglewe can see that both of the solar flaresare a little blown out.

So I went ahead and backed things offto an exposure value of negative 0.5,which still preserves those highlights,but goes ahead and dims them down a little bit.And then, I decided I wanted tobring out the color a bitso I dropped down to the Vibrance value,and pressed Shift + up arrow five times in a rowin order to take that value up to 50,and I also took the Saturation up to plus 50 as well.And that just helps to bring outthe colorful highlights that are showing up from the sunaround the perimeter of the moon.

Alright now I want you to take a closer look at this corona.Notice how it's leaping off up left and down right,and then it's leaping in an arcstraight up at the top as well as another arcdown here at, what would that be, about 7 o'clock?Well I wanted to bring out the detail as much as possible,and I noticed I could do that bytaking the clarity value up,and so I thought, to heck with it,I'll take that clarity value all the way to plus 100.So let me just show you the difference.

This is clarity set to negative 100.Everything gets pretty darn blurry.And this is plus 100 where wehave all this wonderful detail.Problem is, if I zoom in down right hereyou can see that we have an awful lot of noise,and so that meant I needed toswitch over to the Detail panel,and then, I went aheadand clicked in the Luminance value right here,down in the Noise Reduction section of this panel.And I pressed Shift + up arrow a buncha times in a row.Now you have to let things settle downin order to see exactly what's going to happen,but I noticed that a Luminance valueof about 70 I ended up smoothingout that noise very nicely,but I also ended up getting rid of a lot of that detail.

And you could crank the Luminance Detailvalue up to something like 80 if you want to,but I also decided to bring theLuminance value back down to 40.Ends up looking pretty nice,and then notice that we also havesome color variations going on,and so I took the Color value up to 25%.And I'm going to zoom out a little bit as well,and I'm going to try playing with thisLuminance Contrast value right here.And let's go ahead and take it up to 50.

Alright, now I'm going to switch back to my basic panel,and I'll zoom out just a little bit.Now to be perfectly frank and honest,this is a color accurate representation of the eclipse.Now to anything, to the naked eye,it ends up looking a little bit blue.Something in the neighborhood ofa temperature value of negative 10when I'm working with a flight image file,but I decided I wanted to infuse the coronawith something resembling sunlight.So I went ahead and took that temperature value up to 30,like so, which makes it extremely yellow,and then I took the tint value up to 30 as wellwhich makes it more of a muted orange.

At which point I'll go aheadand click Okay in order to accept that change,and just for the record,here's the before unprocessed version of the image,and here's the after versionwhich has a lot more detail in that coronaalthough it also exhibits more noise,but to my way of thinking it's a good trade off.Alright now, if you zoom out,the image is going to look pretty darn centered.In other words, I did a good job of keepingthe sun in the center of the framewhich is no small feat I'm here to tell you,but it isn't entirely centered.

So let's say you want to exactly center the image,in that case, go ahead and zoom in tight on the moon,and then select the Ellipse toolfrom the Shape Tool fly-out menu.At least this is the way I decided to work,and now you want to draw a big circlewhile pressing the Shift key,and then, keep that Shift key down,and press the Spacebar in order to align the circleexactly with the perimeter of the dark moon,which, for me, happens right about here.It looks like I need to take it overjust a little bit left and right.

And then when you get it centeredgo ahead and release the Spacebar,and finally, release the Shift keyin order to create that big black circle.Now we're not going to keep the circle in placewe're just going to use it to set a couple of guidesby first pressing Ctrl + Ror Command + R on a Mac to bring up the rulers.And then, you want to drag down from the tophorizontal ruler until you snap into alignmentwith this left hand point right there.And then you want to drag from the vertical rulerover on the left hand side of the windowuntil you snap into alignment with the top point.

At which point you can press Ctrl + R,or Command + R on a Mac to hide the rulers,and then, notice this ellipse's oneshape over here inside the Layers panel.We're done with it nowso you could get rid of it by pressing the Backspace keyor the Delete key on the Mac.Alright, now go ahead and press Ctrl + zero,or Command + zero on the Mac to zoom out,and then grab the Crop Tool.At which point you'll see that theactual center of the image is downand to the left of where we want the center to be.So go ahead and position your cursorat the intersection of those two center guides,and then, press and hold the Alt key,or the Option key on a Mac,and drag out until you snap the crop boundaryto the right hand edge as well as the topof the image as we're seeing right here.

So you basically want to drag down,and to the right, or, if you prefer,down and to the left as far as you can.At which point just go ahead and releaseto create that crop boundary.Whether Delete Crop Pixels isturned on or off doesn't matterbecause there's no way to damage a smart object.So just go ahead and press the Enter key,or the Return key on a Mac,to accept that change.And then, assuming that you want to jettison the guides,go up to the View menu,and choose the Clear Guides command.And then, finally, I'll go ahead and press Shift + Fto switch to the full-screen mode,and I'll zoom on into the image as well.

And that is at least one way to process,and center a bonafide total solareclipse here inside Photoshop.Alright now the thing I want to emphasize hereis, again, I am not a photographer,and yet I was able to achievewhat I consider to be a pretty impressive image.If I could do it you can do it too.Just remember 400 millimeter fixedalong with a 2x extender gives youthe ability to shoot the sky, the moon or the sunare going to take up the full frame.

Now if you're a member of Lynda.com slash LinkedIn Learningthen I have a followup movie in whichI show you to take that noise aroundthe perimeter of the image that's still eating at me,and we're going to downplay it.We're going to smooth it outnot using the new Iris Blur filter,although that does work,but rather, we're going to go old school with radial blur.Deke's Techniques, each and every week.Keep watching.

Resume Transcript Auto-Scroll

Author

Updated

2/13/2018

Released

1/13/2011

This course is a collection of short Photoshop and Illustrator projects and creative effects that can be completed in ten minutes or less. The series is taught by computer graphics guru Deke McClelland, and presented in his signature step-by-step style. The intent is to reveal how various Photoshop and Illustrator features can be combined and leveraged in real-world examples so that they can be applied to creative projects right away.

Skill Level Intermediate

116h 46m

Duration

2,345,940

Views

Show MoreShow Less

Q: Why can't I earn a Certificate of Completion for this course?

A: We publish a new tutorial or tutorials for this course on a regular basis. We are unable to offer a Certificate of Completion because it is an ever-evolving course that is not designed to be completed. Check back often for new movies.